As a guest lecturer in an 8th grade classroom, I started a discussion by writing on the whiteboard “freedom,” then a vertical line. “What’s the opposite of freedom?” Writing the offered answers at the other end of the spectrum, I asked, “What are some opposites of those words?” I’d been told by a professor that the game was college level, but these 8th graders nailed it. The only stretch I helped them make was that one opposite of order is chaos, maybe too much of a good thing that might be called flexibility or creativity. Then we talked about right and left, placing the parties on the political compass (or Nolan chart). I passed out the cards to the game fractioNation as a way to have the kids pinpoint values that each party emphasized and the causes they cared about. We posted the cards onto the board with magnets in the quadrants where they belonged. As a trained mediator, I know not to tell anyone they’re wrong. It’s embarrassing, insulting, and doesn’t create buy-in. For responses that weren’t in line with my understanding, I’d say “tell me about that,” or I’d make a guess about what they meant and ask if I understood correctly. I’d ask, “but what if…” and they’d figure out where I was going. Sometimes the cards just ended up in a different place than I would put them, so I'd say, “I would have put it over there, but okay.” Mostly they helped each other, with a lot of raised hands. This gave them enough background knowledge to play fractioNation and domiNation as the next class activity.